Profile Information

Blog Comments & Posts

I'm slightly perturbed that people who are "advocating results" and evangelizing "solid social media skills" are all novices at BOTH SEO and Social Media.

I MYSELF am not an expert on either, but I call SHENANIGANS on everyone that's screaming "outcomes, outcomes, outcomes."

A HUGE component of social media is branding as an excercise. And branding as a WHOLE is an excercise in cost savings on the aquisition of the future customer.

It takes a very savvy analyst to understand the holistic relationship your tweets have on moving the needle. In fact, my ONLY caveat to Rand's post would be to stay Stumble Upon belongs in the FIRST column of the infograpihc. It's an EASY social media channel to manage; at the very TOP LEVEL you know your cost against referred converters. Meanwhile Facebook should probably be in the SECOND category, just because there are so many levels of segmentation and basic targeting options you have like "advertising by occupation." (FYI, a tidbit for those social media mavens on Stumble. You should get TWO referals from stumble upon: one for the actual "flash" of the page, and another for an actual click through. So if your cookie lasts longer than your standard 30 days, you might get attribution errors for conversions as a result of a Stumble Upon campaign. In best practice, take the number of referrers from www.stumbleupon.com and not the stumbleupon.com. So dub dub dub = click through. No www = just a flash of the page.)

... I'm soooo off topic. Yes, social media needs to have outcomes, but you need to understand your marketing channels HOLISTICALLY to properly attribute how successful your social media campaigns are. If you're the newbie that's hiding behind a "consulting persona" screaming "social media results, conversions, sales," them I'm skeptical of your skill set as a whole. Your social media mix should be measured and optimized for a broader outcome than just "sales for the month."

I'm actually curious to see in aggregate how Google treats these Q&As long term. Two reasons why:

1) the one most SEO professionals game is "Yahoo Answers" because after you leap through the little "UGC" hurdles you can post links.

2) most Q&A sites spam themselves.

Yes, I said it. Q&A sites like Yahoo and Answers.com spam themselves before getting any real end user interaction with a question or forum post. The algo is actually pretty slick. They hone in on specific key word phrases that bots can generically "start the conversation with." And although there isn't any tangible SEO value or link equity, a typical Q&A post contains 3 to 4 bot responses right off the bat. I could be TOTALLY WRONG, but see for yourself. Ask a question on Yahoo Answers, see if you get a generic response right away?

I've said this a couple of times now, but I think it's worth re-iterating.

I have a STRONG STRONG suspicion that Google weighs in the authority of the author LESS than the total number of social signals - AT LEAST in the way we are thinking of "authority."

For example - in our community, a tweet from RAND would be weighed in far heavily than mine. We all agree to that. But HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING if I had more followers than Rand, then my tweets would have a greater chance of being re-tweeted.

But then you can throw in OTHER SIGNALS like how many domains, social media platforms, etc link to Rand's tweet - then you get a compounded social signal from multiple sources - like getting backlinks from multiple domains VS 10 links from 1 domain.

Now I'm not saying social signal authority isn't measured, I just don't think it's as qualitative as we think it is. There's a natural checksum that occurs against user base and the KW phrases in the signal. If Rand says something about SEO, all things being equal, he'd probably have a more relevant / engaging tweet than me -----> more retweets from other authorities in the space that have MORE followers than my circle of friends -----> greater chance of his message generating a better signal. Yes we can GAME social signals. But it's not as scalable. 1 person with 10,000 bots tweeting "FREE WIDGETS" might generate better short term results, but it won't scale for CRO and it won't register long term sustainable SEO.

I don't think "Design for a broad audience or you will loose sales. Simply really." means looking at most used browser as a real KPI or performance metric. I think that statement just means use common sense and design for all three browsers.

This isn't an oddity though really or a design error. The browsers themselves don't give you much actionable data because (A) you don't know exactly what's broke with a website and how the end user is looking at it differently from you, (B) the elemental difference like a snippet of CSS here or a picture not showing up there might not have the OVERALL effect on conversion rates you're attributing too. What if the ONLY DIFFERENCE between the way your website looks on IE7 vs Firefox is that the colors look smoother for borders and line breaks? Are you going to attribute the converion difference to THAT attribute?

My point is this isn't a metric or KPI really that gauges how poor or well your site is designed to optimize for a conversion. You should always design websites to function on all three browsers. And even if in the billion to one chance you had to sacrifice a design element to look better in one browser or another, that shouldn't be the number you look at to gauge success or bottom line functionality. I was much more polite and demographic as the other counterparts, but this post reads like "web analytics gave me a KEY actionable insight that more people are using IE when visiting my website. SOOOo I should design my website to work in IE as well." That doesn't sound right to you does it? It's not an actionable insight, it's just noise. It's like trying to measure how many times someone clicked the refresh button and analyzing which pages were "self refferers." It doesn't mean anything to an analyst.

I am uncomfortable with the concept of just designing a website in favor of one browser or another. It's like optimizing your SEO strategy for certain keywords while ignoring syns. FYI web analytics is my core - but let's not get too deep into my personal expertise. Just ask yourself if you think the best converting browser skews to the website topic or niche? Remember, analytics sampled too small can be very misleading. If any Moz staff wants to chime in about the "best converting" browser for SEOMoz, I'm sure they would tell you a different story. Remember that the numbers never lie, but the story has to have proper context. I suspect that the only reason why IE converts better for your sites is because of the topic, demographic, and other external factors totally unrelated to aggregate browser preference - rather browser preference related to your specific niche.

Most likely because the retweet might have INCLUDED text or caption. Also the engine might have autocorrected. This isn't the case of "Tea" ranking for "Tee" It's the mispselling of a word ranking for "beginner"

I think there's a natural checksum. (Coming from someone that dabbled in the "darker side" of tweets... Twitter has gotten really good at spotting artificial twitter accounts. MORE IMPORTANTLY, it's harder to game the "retweet" ecosphere. You can have a MILLION FOLLOWERS for one account, but without any traction from your follower base to retweet, you get no juice.

Twitter is a very significant ranking factor. Think CMS on steroids with automated Turk for content spin. Think of the language a tweet is built on (ruby) and the containt which is a URL shortner. It's a link that gets weighted differently than a normal link, but probably just a little more juice than a comment dofo from a PR5

Responding to what everyone must be curious about; "does the number of followers have any weight." My answer is "not so much."

Well since the cat is out of the bag... (and has been for a while I might add) yes Tweets do have a huge impact. Corrosponding with Rand's previous post about logical directions the engines are taking to weight social signals, our tests invovled Volume to Quality to # of Followers.

DISCLAIMER: I am a NEWB to SEO and my core is web analytics. I've been a member since Sept. and too busy with stuff to dedicate more time to SEO, I.E. VERY VERY VERY NEW TO SEO. I'm talking... "omg the engines can detect invisble text???" JK but you get the idea.

That being said, some of our tests have shown that it isn't so much the # of followers or the quality of the Tweeter, rather it's focused more on the # of tweets - we suspect there's an element of timestamp to either (A) the tweeter and (b) the longetivty of the tweets - or how long a link is shared.

It makes sense right? If you have 10,000 followers you have X percentage of people that might find the tweet interesting and retweet. So # of followers trails the likely hood of a certain user base to retweet. So there's automatically some weight given to a more prominent tweeter without having to weight him or her differently. I don't suspect the engines will give THAT much weight to the # of followers. (Unless twitter gives engines data to create a "Tweeter Quality Score.) Think of tweets as comment posts. The code is Ruby, and the container is t.co - their URL shortener. Think, mini wordpress.